Visit to Birmingham Allotments from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) – 21st to 23rd June 2024
If you’re not familiar with the RHS, it’s the UK’s leading gardening charity that’s been going since 1804. It aims to enrich everyone’s life through plants, and make the UK a greener and more beautiful place. Focussing on the science – including research – art and practice of horticulture, it is active in campaigns like Greening Great Britain and organises education and community programmes.
Every year a group from the RHS Fruit, Vegetable and Herb Committee spend a weekend carrying out allotment visits – in recent years they have been to London, Cardiff and Nottingham. For 2024, they chose Birmingham and got in touch with the BDAC to ask for help in contacting Birmingham sites so they could offer timely and relevant advice to some of our 6000 plus plotholders throughout the city. The BDAC then offered the opportunity to the 100+ sites to host a visit and of those that applied, the team of Advisors was able to visit 9 in different parts of Birmingham between 21st and 23rdJune: Oldford Farm, Walsall Road, Uplands, Pereira Road, Moor Pool, Moor Green, Northleigh Road (Ward End Gardeners), Longmeadow Crescent and Manor House Lane.
For those of us who were on our sites when they visited, it was great to have that individual attention on our ailing fruit tree or wilting tomato plants. It was really useful having an expert eye to identify pest damage and plant diseases and recommend how to nurture or save your perennial and annual plants – or start again if they can’t be saved. Certainly more reliable than looking things up on a website where the often general advice may not suit your local soil or other conditions.
The Association hosts from Committees were able to give the visitors a tour on each site and we were also able to show them our own successful growing methods. For example, Elijah at Walsall Road grows corn and beans side by side. Roy at Oldford Farm has yams in his greenhouse, and lots of other people showed off their fruit bushes, vegetables and sweetcorn plants including children from the Youth Pathway mentoring project at Northleigh Road.
On Saturday evening Moor Green Association hosted a Question and Answer session in their pavilion, and Advisors Jim Arbury, Lawrence Weston, Rekha Mistry, David Allison, Sue Stickland and Matt Hall fielded a range of questions about a wide range of topics relevant to many plotholders. This session was open to people from any site – important when only a handful actually had a visit from the RHS Advisors.
We hope that some of the tips the RHS team picked up from our experienced plotholders will find their way into their library of horticultural advice. It felt like a two way exchange during the weekend for those who didn’t need specific tips and it was appreciated by the RHS team, so in the future the BDAC should be able to build on that to develop a partnership for Birmingham based projects. Lawrence Weston, who initiated the idea of visits back in October 2023, has already written to say: “Thank you for facilitating such an excellent weekend for the committee……I personally took a huge amount away from the visits and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s an experience I will remember for a long time…… Please do not hesitate to let me know if I can provide anything for your write up, or otherwise assist in the future.”
Finally, for the majority of plotholders who are looking to improve their crops, most of what the Advisors recommended can already be found on the public part of the a very comprehensive RHS website which is comprehensive. There is also a personalised advice service for RHS members (individual or family).
For more info on RHS, go to www.rhs.org.uk